Allegory interweaves the sacred and the profane as an instructive form of expression.

Evidence

That de Man attributes the secular attitude to the early romantics while Benjamin places it in the earlier, baroque period is really beside the point for my purposes. What is worth noting is that through his account of baroque allegory Benjamin provides a different understanding of “the secular” than the one de Man does in his discussion of romantic symbolism. For Benjamin takes allegory to be not merely a conventional relationship between an image and its meaning but a “form of expression.” Citing Renaissance sources, Benjamin argues that emblems and hieroglyphs do not merely show something, they also instruct. (Language is not an abstraction that stands apart from “the real”; it embodies and mediates the life of people, gestures, and things in the world.) And what the emblems have to teach is more authoritative than purely personal preferences. The interweaving in such communication of what today many would separate as the sacred and the profane remains for Benjamin an essential feature of allegory. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 320

Categorization

• DEFINE: Benjamin’s redefinition of allegory — as a ‘form of expression’ that instructs and interweaves sacred and profane, not just a conventional image-meaning relation — is the core conceptual point.
• DEEPTHINKING: The interweaving of sacred and profane in allegorical communication, where language ‘embodies and mediates the life of people, gestures, and things,’ is a dense, paradigm-touching claim about how secularity is not the mere absence of the sacred.
• XREF: connects to: Profanation returns sacred things to common, playful use. — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 120